Chloé Deambrogio

Chloe is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Criminology. She completed a DPhil in Criminology at the University of Oxford in 2020 as an ESRC and an Amelia Jackson Scholar (Exeter College, Oxford). Between 2021 and 2024, Chloe was a Junior Research Fellow in Law at Merton College, Oxford. Prior to joining Merton, she was a Modern Law Review Fellow and a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Exeter.

Chloe’s research sits at the intersection of critical legal theory, death penalty scholarship, mental disability law, and race and gender studies. Her first book, Judging Insanity, Punishing Difference (Stanford University Press 2023), drew on unpublished trial records to explore how race and gender stereotypes shaped expert and lay understandings of mental illness and criminal responsibility in Texas capital cases over the 20th century.

Her current project, funded by the British Academy, analyses court opinions and interviews with legal actors to identify the strategies used by criminal justice officials in the American South to advance and/or deny the due process and equal protection rights of marginalised groups in capital cases. The project integrates traditional normative analyses of US Supreme Court rulings with an empirically grounded approach, aimed at advancing a contextual understanding of the capacity of courts of law to operate as agents of social and political change.